1.8 概念还是技能？

One of the main disadvantages of the ICT-led approach was that it focused heavily on skills — what children needed to be able to do — rather than concepts — when and why they should employ particular skills.

What’s the purpose?

A classic example is that of text formatting in word processing and presentation applications.
Children are often quick to learn how to change the style, colour, and size of fonts. However, they often don’t understand why and where it is appropriate to do this, so their documents become difficult to read. The fact that they have mastered the skill of formatting the text doesn’t mean that they necessarily understand the concept that well-chosen changes to font styles can make text more readable and easier to navigate. To format well, they need to know when and why to use a larger font size or a different colour, and understand the purpose of a heading or a bullet point.
This is why there is so much more to computing than learning ICT-based skills. Using the English curriculum as an example, the key phrase is to create “content that accomplishes given goals”. This is where the purpose is introduced. To achieve this, learners must have a conceptual understanding of what they are doing, as well as the skills to accomplish it. This is repeated throughout the curriculum.

教计算课程中的技能和概念Skills and concepts in the Teach Computing Curriculum

When planning a curriculum, it is a good idea to think carefully about achieving a balance between skills and concepts — put simply, the why as well as the what. To do this, it is helpful to break down small sections of learning into the skills and concepts a learner would need to meet the curriculum points. From these points, you can create learning objectives and success criteria.
To illustrate this, you can look at the Vector Drawing unit from the Teach Computing Curriculum, which was written for learners aged 9 to 10. You may not know what a vector drawing is, but don’t worry; this will actually be helpful for this activity, so please don’t be tempted to look it up at this point!
The first activity in the first lesson of the unit asks learners to make a picture using only a selection of shapes. Without the context of the learning objectives or success criteria, what concept and skills do you think this activity is introducing? Can you think of any other examples of concepts that underlie skills? Add your ideas to the comments section below.